


Differential Son

by LananiA3O



Series: Batman: Arkham Compendium [19]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, Batman: Arkham (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, References to Child Prostitution, Swearing, bad dad Bruce Wayne, good dad Bruce Wayne, in the batfam stalking is caring, references to past torture, trying his best Bruce Wayne
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-16
Updated: 2017-08-16
Packaged: 2018-12-14 17:12:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11787678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LananiA3O/pseuds/LananiA3O
Summary: Jason has fatally shot Julian Day and the confrontation Bruce had with him afterwards has left both of them rattled and injured. In the aftermath, Bruce tries to find and talk to Jason once again, but it doesn't turn out quite the way he planned.





	Differential Son

**Author's Note:**

  * For [audreycritter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/audreycritter/gifts).



> Written for audreycritter, who blazed through my stories in 2.5 days and somehow still does not hate me, even though Bruce is her favorite character and my Compendium!Bruce is... well... a massive jerk with a heart of gold. Figured I'd write something that shows Bruce trying to parent and kind of, sort of, half-succeeding in it in some ways but not in others? He's trying, ok.
> 
> Anyway, this story takes place at the time of chapter 8 in Ill Weeds Grow Apace, in the week after Jason killed Julian Day and was stuck in bed due to his nerve damage from his time in the Asylum.
> 
> For more scheduling updates, batfam discussions/asks, and occasional random shenanigans, please visit my tumblr:  
> http://lananiscorner.tumblr.com/

Snowfall was usually heavy on the Upper East Coast around this time of year. However, even by Gotham’s standards, this was torture. Bruce drew his cape tightly around his body as he huddled in the alcove underneath an old grizzled gargoyle.

The blizzard had arrived earlier today, just before noon, and had taken Gotham and her people by utter surprise. According to the weather forecast, it should have been at least another day. Instead, the storm had hit in the middle of Black Friday, leaving Gotham’s midday skies dark and its people stranded in whatever over-crowded, bargain-offering shopping malls they had been confined to. The rate of traffic accidents had risen by a sharp twenty-three percent. The rate of assaults had risen by fifty-eight. Throughout the city, shopping mall security personnel had found themselves outmatched by the sheer amount of incidents to handle and the ERs of Gotham’s various hospitals were filled to the brink.

Bruce had woken up to reports that would have bordered on instantly alarming on any other day. This time, they had seemed almost trite compared to everything else around him.

It had not been a good night. Jason had shot Julian Day. The thought still left a sour feeling in Bruce’s stomach, regret, mingled with guilt, disappointment and fury. Not at Jason, of course, but at himself. He should have stopped him. He should have stopped Day. Or Jason. Or both. Instead, there was now yet another man’s blood on Red Hood’s, on Jason’s hands.

He had tried to help, of course, even after the deed was done. He hadn’t meant to hurt Jason, just stop him, but that didn’t change the fact that he had. Bruce winced as he recalled the cracking sound that had come from Jason’s shoulder as Ghost’s boot had connected with it and the equally loud cracking sound as Jason had pushed it back into place. The conversation that had followed… had been a disaster. There was no kinder way to put it. He had hoped that using Jason’s name, rather than Red Hood’s would make things easier, would let his son know that he was there as Bruce, rather than Ghost, but it had only made him lash back harder, as if he had somehow insulted him by using that name. Yet the thing that had stung the most was what Jason had said next:

_“What are you gonna do now, huh? Lock me up in Blackgate? I mean you would probably go for Arkham if it were still habitable and functional, but—“_

Bruce still shuddered at the memory. What had Joker _done_? What had this evil, maniacal _monster_ done to his son, to make him think he would just lock up him, _his son_ , and throw away the key? Bruce would have asked, had he had the chance, but Jason had taken that option from him, using his flash bang grenades for a quick escape. Bruce had tailed him across the rooftops all the way to Ryker Heights, where a dispatch call about a hostage situation had changed the playing field. By the time Ghost had resolved that crisis, Jason had been long gone. His trail had ended on Bleake Island, on a decrepit warehouse rooftop with nothing but a discarded pack of cigarettes, another used flash bang grenade, and a very upset Dick Grayson.

 _“Don’t you dare to talk to me now, Bruce,”_ Dick had yelled at him as he had approached. _“Just stay the hell away from him, you read me?!”_

Dick had disappeared in an equal hurry and Bruce had felt his heart sink. He had tried to draw one son closer. Instead he had driven away two. He had pushed the guilt down together with everything else, collected the evidence on the rooftop, and returned to his newly built and freshly compromised cave under Bracken’s abandoned subway station.

The cigarettes were home-made, low in tar, and had a flavor topping of cinnamon. Bruce had smiled at that. Even after all these years, Jason still had a sweet-tooth. The flash bang had been home-made as well, although its design closely resembled a type used commonly by South American guerilla groups. The smoke was a near perfect match for Bruce’s own smoke grenades, with an added coloring agent to turn it red. That, too, had brought back memories of Jason’s time as Robin, of how he had used to change everything he used on a daily basis from blue to red, if given half the chance. Bruce had tried to dissuade him at first. Red was a naturally stimulating, intensifying color, and did not lend itself to promoting the cool, calculative silence this job required. Jason could not have cared less.

The smile the memories had brought to the corners of his mouth had died quickly throughout his weekly phone call with Alfred. His sister, Margaret, was not getting better. Alfred was already making the first arrangements. She would be gone soon. So when Alfred had inquired how Bruce was doing, Bruce had lied to him, told him that everything was as usual.

He should have known better. Alfred could always tell. Alfred always knew. This time had not been any different. Alfred had ended the call with empty, cold, formulaic pleasantries and a scathing, carefully veiled reprimand for the blatant lie.

Bruce had forced down his dinner – delicious as always, because Alfred had thought ahead and prepared and frozen enough dinner for two months – together with Alfred’s biting words, before going to bed, where his stomach had threatened to regurgitate his dinner, just as his mind had regurgitated Alfred’s criticism. Sleep had come for him eventually. It had dragged him under, into a terrible world of endless, tiled corridors in the Asylum, with Jason’s screams echoing off the walls, calling for him, begging to be saved, before being murdered by the single, terrifying, _final_ sound of a bullet shooting through the air. Just like back then. He had been helpless in 1985. He had been helpless in 2011 and he was helpless now, and no matter how fast he ran, Jason always died. His son always died. Most of the time, Bruce could not even find his body. The one time he finally did, the walls were painted in Jason’s blood.

_I ENDED UP HERE BECAUSE OF YOU_

Compared to his nightmares, a fifty-three percent rise in crime was _nothing_. He would weather it just as he weathered this storm, but first, he needed answers. With a slight frown, Bruce took the hacking device out of his utility belt and started weaseling through the firewalls.

He hated doing this. He hated having to do this to Barbara, of all people, but she was the only one Bruce was sure was on speaking terms with Jason right now and if anyone was going to be in contact with him, it would be her. If there was anyone among his children Jason might trust even just a little, it was her. And that meant Bruce needed her. He needed her to get to Jason. The feedback from the gadget in his hand crackled in his ear, buzzing noise as the receiver tried to pick up, then strengthen and refine the signal. Barbara’s voice was too distorted for him to understand. Jason’s started out as a jumbled mess. Then, as the last firewall fell, the line was suddenly loud and clear.

Bruce instantly wished it wasn’t.

“Dates back to the asylum. Doesn’t usually get this bad, but extreme weather like this blizzard always makes it worse. Bruce... did not help.”

Jason sounded hurt. Not “oh, my poor, poor heart is aching in torment” kind of hurt, but actual, physical, bodily pain. Bruce winced. It had always taken a lot for Jason to show vulnerability. Anger, happiness, sadness, curiosity, surprise, empathy... those had eventually come to him easily enough. But vulnerability? That took more than simple pain.

“That’s a very diplomatic understatement.” Barbara growled through her teeth. “I swear to god, if he sets foot into this tower the first thing he’s getting is fifty-thousand volts to the crotch.” Bruce eyed the towering structure with its ticking face to his right warily and scratched whatever plans he had made to try and talk to Barbara in person. _Another day_. “Is there anything we can do to help you?”

“No.”

Jason didn’t sound angry. He did not even sound sad. He sounded like nothing. Nothing at all, as if this was an ordinary day for him, as if he had resigned himself to his torment already and was just waiting for the storm to pass. Bruce shuddered. This was not the snarky, headstrong boy he had once taken in.

“But if Bruce does show up at the Clock Tower, I’ll want video of you frying his balls with those escrima sticks in your wheel chair. I know we’ve got every inch of that tower covered by CCTV. Make it happen.”

This was more like it. Bruce felt a smile tug at the corners of his mouth just as Barbara gave a short, light-hearted laugh. He dropped out of the line just before the half minute mark that he had set for himself and returned to Bracken.

It was time to analyze this data and find out where in the city Jason had gone into hiding.

***

In the end, it took him three days. Bruce wanted to curse under his snow-chilled breath as he approached his target. It should have been easier. After all, it was not as if Jason had made himself hard to find. Half his safe-houses were either under his real name or slight variations thereof. With anyone else, Bruce would have called that sloppy.

Jason was not sloppy. Jason was ballsy. Jason was occasionally arrogant. Jason was defiant. Most of all, though, Jason was _deliberate_. He had made himself easy to find, probably both to mock the world that had so easily forgotten about him a few months after his ‘death’, and to provide diversions. The thought reminded him of the first time he had taken Jason home to the manor and Alfred had retrieved not one or two, but three shivs from his clothing.

_“One for them to find easily, one for them to work for and call it a day, and one for me to strike back with.”_

If Alfred had ever doubted that Jason would fit into this family, Bruce was certain that was the moment those doubts had vanished.

This was no different. A couple of easy safe-houses to find. A couple more difficult ones to uncover. And probably at least a handful that Bruce was just as likely to find as this storm was likely to clear up within the next two hours.

The fact that his analysis of Jason’s conversation with Barbara, his triangulation of signals and relays, had brought him to one of the easy to find safe-houses set off alarm bells in his head. Exactly how badly hurt was Jason to pick such an unsafe location? And how likely was it that he was still here? With one more deep breath full of icy air, Bruce grappled onto the fire escape facing Jason’s window. He had already tried keeping his distance, but Jason had lined the walls of his safe-house with lead and some damned variation of that reflective material he had built for the militia and Bruce’s sensors had come back blank. He needed a direct line of sight.

The curtains were drawn, but there was no cowl-proofing a window. Judging from the outline of his skeleton, Jason was sitting in his bed, screwdriver in hand, fixing some of his equipment. Most likely a helmet, Bruce mused as he scrolled through the list of materials included in the receipt for this express delivery, sent by Lucius Fox. It was telling that it had been easier for him to hack into Wayne Enterprise’s electronic receipts (the company had been his, after all), than to hack Jason’s own network and get it from there. Through the audio receiver’s of his cowl, Jason’s voice came loud and clear.

“Motherfucking son of a—“

A cough followed, and Bruce felt the smile die on his lips as mild clearing of the throat devolved into a raspy, dark fit of bellows that did not sound healthy at all. There was a distinct wheezing underneath it all that spoke of permanent lung damage. Bruce shook his head. He had always told Jason smoking was a bad idea.

“Fucking hell...” Jason winced, trembling like a leaf as he forced himself out of bed. His movements were slow and disjointed, shambling and uneven, favoring his left leg over his right and trying to move as little as possible in general. Progress was slow, but eventually he made it to the side of the room that was sheltered by the cursed, cowl-proof walls. By the time he returned – way too much later than any young man of Jason’s age and level of fitness should – Jason sank into the bed like a sack full of stones. Soon enough, his breathing evened out just a little and his heart-rate and pulse fell into acceptable ranges for someone who was sleeping. Still, Bruce waited another ten minutes, balancing on the fire escape, before he made his move.

Jason’s alarm system had been about seventy percent of the reason why he was only getting to this so late. Barbara was cautious, but Jason was paranoid. His firewalls had booby-trapped mirrors with trip wires and navigating them without setting off the alarms had been an exercise in sheer frustration. When Alfred had asked him what had him so exasperated during their latest call – how he had known that Bruce _was_ exasperated to begin with was anyone’s guess – Bruce had not been lying when he had said he was ‘dealing with the toughest security system nut he had cracked over the last year’.

Now, he had the access codes, though. The codes and the encryption keys and the (hopefully) full map of every proxy and VPN Jason used to create this Minotaurian labyrinth of firewall nightmares. He used them all, peeling back layer upon layer upon layer of security, until, at last, the system was open. For twenty seconds at least. He shut off the cameras, disabled the alarms, picked the window lock and slipped in with just a second to spare.

Jason really was sleeping. Either that, or he was acting like it very well and waiting for the perfect time to strike, waiting for him to come in range. Somehow, that was not the reason why Bruce’s feet refused to move and it took him a moment until the gears finally clicked in his brain and he realized what was wrong with this picture.

Jason looked tiny. He hadn’t looked so small since the first time Bruce had met him – a scrawny street kid, malnourished with far too few pounds and inches for his age, especially since all that had been there in terms of weight had been muscle close to the bone. He was a far cry from that now, Bruce knew, but he _looked_ the part just the same. He was curled up under the sheets, a tiny, tight ball of scarred flesh, with his left cheek buried _in_ the pillow, hiding the scar, and one hand buried _under_ the pillow, curled around a switch blade. Only his right leg was extended as far away as possible, almost stubbornly, as if bringing his right foot anywhere near its sister limb was going to make the universe implode. He was just about ready to shrug that off as Jason’s sheer unrelenting nature breaking through a trauma-induced return to a fetal position when he noticed what else was wrong about this room.

It was cold.

He hadn’t noticed it immediately upon entering, and why would he? Temperatures outside had been well below freezing, so anything above naturally felt like warmth at first, but now that he was actually spending time in this bleak, woefully under-furnished, under-decorated apartment (at least by Jason’s standards), his body was acclimatizing to the temperatures and what he felt was not good. The cowl confirmed his suspicions: this apartment barely scratched fifty degrees Fahrenheit.

He checked the heater in the bedroom first, but found it cold as a grave, same as the heaters in the bathroom and kitchen. There was an electric heater there, but judging from the state of the wiring, it had shorted out less than forty-eight hours ago. Bruce looked at the broken device in a mixture of unease and intrigue.

This should have been an easy fix. He was not entirely sure what kind of tools Jason was using to build his helmets and he was not stupid enough to go poking around looking for hidden drawers and compartments while Jason was within a twenty feet range, but Jason was smart and resourceful. This should have been an easy fix, and a priority to boot. Jason hated cold, more than he hated hunger, possibly more than he hated drugs. Bruce knew why. He knew what cold had meant to Jason, the depths of despair it had driven him, too, and while he had never discussed it with Jason himself – _I should have_ , Bruce thought sadly as his mind returned to all those wasted opportunities from six years ago – he knew it had scarred his son for life. Jason did not tolerate cold. Not where he slept. Not where he lived.

If this heater was still broken, it was because Jason had not been able to get to it, and the immediate scenarios playing out in his head, the potential reasons why Jason had felt so drained, so broken, so destroyed, that he had hardly been able to walk from his bed to his front door to accept the package with the helmet parts, much less to walk to the kitchen, left him reeling.

Just what had Joker done to him?

_And just how much have I ‘not helped’?_

***

His next stop was the basement. Judging from the even colder air that had greeted him in the hallways, Jason was not alone in his plight. One look at the heating system hidden in the spider-infested underbelly of the building told Bruce all he needed to know.

This landlord deserved to go to jail.

Everyone had duties in life. For a landlord, these included ensuring that all his property was properly heated, insulated, wired and generally in working order. This heating system wasn’t any of these things. The oil tanks were nigh empty. The meters were cracked, one of them was broken. Two of the fuses regulating the system had shorted out. One valve had been dislodged and then hastily put back in place using duct tape. This was not just negligence. This was manslaughter waiting to happen.

Bruce documented the damage for a future visit to the landlord, before loading the latest vlog from the bastard’s trip to Miami. It was less than two hours old and proved that lounging on a beach while the people in his care were slowly going into hypothermia was apparently an acceptable social behavior for this leech. He replayed it twice, then adjusted his voice synthesizer to match and dialed the number written on the heating system’s service card under ‘emergency calls – extra charges and fees may apply’. The way Bruce saw it, extra fees and charges would be the least of Mr. Hannigan’s problems.

Once the call was done, Bruce left through one of the emergency exits, retrieved a set of inconspicuous civilian clothes and a latex mask from one of his nearby caches, and broke back into the building just in time to open the front door for the repair men. The fact that none of them recognized him only proved that this company had not performed any maintenance on the system in this building in months. The repair man shook his head apologetically as he took stock of the many, many issues at hand, before setting to work.

The meters were first, if only to achieve an overview of just how badly the system was damaged. Next came the valve, which was replaced properly at long last. The fuses took longer to fix, mostly because they required shutting off electricity to the entire switchboard and figuring out which of these insanely mapped wires belonged where. Last but not least, Bruce picked the locks to the back alley to let the oil truck move in and lay a heavy-duty hose to the giant barrels. The brown liquid squished in with a happy splash. At the end of three grueling hours, the system was finally ready to go. Bruce watched, content for the first time since he had set foot in this house, as the technician flipped the switch and the system sprang to life with a happy rumble.

“Probably still gonna have to vent the individual heaters in the apartments,” the maintenance worker explained to him as he filled in a receipt with all the necessary data. “But after that, everyone should be safe and secure and snug as a bug.”

“Thank you.” He accepted the bill with a well-staged grimace. Poor, unfortunate Mr. Hannigan would return from Miami soon, only to find himself confronted with a nine-thousand dollar heater repair bill and a two-hundred-and-ten pound angry vigilante. Bruce’s sympathy for the man was dancing lightly around the number zero. With one last look at the heating system, Bruce turned to leave.

***

Getting back into the suit without being seen was easy. Getting back into Jason’s apartment, not so much. The algorithms of his security system were ever changing, and the snow did nothing to make hunching on a fire escape while reconfiguring his tech any easier. By the time Ghost, Bruce, had finally made it back inside through the window, the ears of his cowl had started gathering a thin layer of ice.

Thankfully, Jason was still asleep, even though the previous calm had given way to more coughing and shivering and restless kicking of his left leg. His right remained stretched out as far from the rest of his body as possible and Bruce bumped investigating said behavior up to spot number two on his list.

Number one, the utmost priority right now, was to get some warmth into this icy coffin. He started with the heater in the kitchen, which was turned up to maximum heat, but still barely warm and gurgling quietly as the water tried to push through the air that had accumulated inside. He grabbed a towel from the nearby counter by the stove and set to work. The bleed screw creaked quietly around the valve as he turned it halfway, followed by the distinct hissing of air escaping. He turned it back into its locked position the moment water started soaking through the towel and moved on to the bathroom. This time, he almost missed the cutoff point and nearly burned his hands.

Bruce tried not to think of how the mirror had been deliberately covered with a sheet or how nearly everything in the cabinet with the glass doors was either disinfectant or gauze or how the bottle of paracetamol on top of the sink was still unopened, even though Jason had clearly at least entertained the thought of swallowing some. It had taken Alfred and Bruce weeks to talk Jason into taking medication – _medication, not drugs_ , Alfred had been very consistent with the terminology – but they had done it eventually. Judging from what Bruce saw in front of himself now, it was as if none of the progress they had made with Jason had ever happened, and he could only hope that whatever circle of hell Joker had landed in was going to leave him trapped in eternal agony.

The heater in the bedroom was last. Bruce kept one eye on Jason as he freed the trapped air. Saying Jason was a light sleeper would be an understatement and the last thing Bruce needed right now, was for him to wake up. He did not need, did not want, another fight. Thankfully, fate seemed to smile on him for once. He waited until the heater had grown hot from the fresh supply of water, before taking the bleed screw and towel back into the kitchen. He had done his best not to leave any trace of his visit, but even so Jason might still figure it out. All he could do was to try. All he had ever been able to do with Jason was to try.

Now, with his priority task taken care off, Bruce finally had a chance to take a closer at him and what he saw made his stomach curl into a tight knot. Jason was still coughing, still shivering, still hurting. Bruce switched on the deep tissue scanner of his cowl and ran a full analysis from head to toe.

The skeletal level scan came back mostly as expected. There were signs of previous trauma on most of his bones, but that was par for the course in their line of work. Nothing fresh, nothing recent. If it hadn’t been for Jason’s right ankle, he would have switched to the next tissue level. Instead, his attention was hooked on the fine lines and discolorations that spoke of repeated trauma to talus, tibia and fibula. Anger curled in his gut like a venomous snake. This should never have happened to Jason. He should have been there. He should have protected him. This was his _son_ , after all.

He switched to the muscle tissue scanner next. That, too, showed signs of old wounds, although nothing of the repeatedly traumatizing nature of Jason’s ankle, at least. Bruce took comfort in that. The most recent injury seemed to be a stab wound to the left shoulder. _The shoulder I kicked_ , Bruce thought with a sharp pang of guilt, even as the wound Joker had given him back in Arkham City started burning in sympathy. Judging from what else Jason had said to Barbara – cold weather making it worse – it could not just be the muscle tissue that gave Jason trouble. With a quick sigh, Bruce switched to the third scanner, the cutaneous level.

Part of him regretted it instantly. Jason’s skin was a battlefield of old scars. Bruce recognized less than a fraction of them and that left only one explanation. Joker. Always Joker. He was half way through his thoughts of how much he wished he could have the clown alive again, only for five minutes, to _hurt_ him for what he had done, when the sound of muffled sobbing brought him back to the situation at hand. He switched off the scanner and looked up at the bed again.

Jason was tossing and turning, muttering through the coughs and wheezes that still came from his throat. For once, the care he took in keeping his ankle safe from the rest of his thrashing limbs was forgotten as Jason curled in on himself, drawing the sheets tighter and all but grinding his face into the pillow. Among the rambling murmurs, Bruce could only make out two words. _Don’t. Please._

The situation was painfully familiar and against his better judgment, Bruce found himself sitting on the edge of Jason’s bed. So many of his first nights in the manor had passed like this, with Jason reliving some horror or another and Bruce sitting there, completely at a loss for what to do. It had been _so easy_ with Dick. Wake him. Hug him. Tell him everything was going to be alright. There. Poof. All worries gone. Jason... Jason had always been so much more complicated. Transitioning from one to the other had been like having mastered fractions only to suddenly be thrown into a class of advanced differential equations. The first time he had tried to use the same approach with Jason that he had used with Dick, Jason had socked him in the face and fled from the manor.

“Jason...”

His hand moved almost as if it had a will of its own, brushing softly over Jason’s ice-cold cheeks and scorching hot forehead. The fever was a decent explanation as to why Jason had not woken up yet, but it was only a matter of time. He was going to regret this. Bruce just knew it. This could only end in tears.

 _Your son is already in tears_ , part of his mind pointed out, not at all helpful, and for a moment, Bruce could not tell whether it had been his own voice or Alfred’s, until he realized that it had been neither.

It had been his father’s. And Thomas Wayne, as always, was right. Jason was crying. The previous frantic pleading and pained sobbing had made way for a haunting silence, as Jason curled in tighter on himself and the tears streamed down his face. His lips were still moving rapidly though, and Bruce strained to make out the movements in the darkness of the apartment.

_don’t leave me don’t replace me please I’ll be better I’ll never complain again I promise I was stupid I’m sorry so very sorry I promise I’ll be better just don’t leave me here with him please_

“Hush, Jason...” Bruce swallowed hard to push down the guilt that tried to climb up his throat. He pressed a gloved finger to Jason’s lips, even as his other hand continued to brush over his forehead and through his tousled hair.

What else was he supposed to do? He had never figured it out. Almost two years with Jason under his roof, and he had never fully comprehended how to calm, how to heal, this high-strung and broken boy. Bruce _knew_ he was a pathetic excuse of a parent and it was moments like these when he wished Alfred was here. When he wished his own father were here. 

_Alfred would know. Father would know._

Bruce did not. Seven years and five months since they had first met and Jason still managed to make him feel helpless.

“Jason,” Bruce tried again, but the words stuck in his throat. What was he supposed to say?

I won’t leave you? He already had. Multiple times. _Liar._

I won’t replace you? He already had. _Liar._

I won’t leave you there with him? He had. _Liar. Liar, liar, liar._

He refused to make promises he couldn’t keep. Not to his son, who had lived, survived, through so much.

“I’m so sorry, Jason.” That was really all he could do. Apologize. _Like Jason just apologized?_ Part of him mocked, and suddenly it was as if he had walked right into a brick wall. He wanted to slap himself for not seeing it sooner. Bruce took a deep breath.

“It’s not your fault, Jason.” He couldn’t make promises about the future, but perhaps he could clear up some misconceptions about the past. “You were reckless sometimes. You were fierce and temperamental, but you were never stupid. You were good. You were really good. It’s not your fault.”

It didn’t seem to work. For a few seconds, it didn’t seem to work, and Bruce cursed himself as he kept on brushing through Jason’s hair. If it hadn’t been for the sudden hitching of Jason’s breath and the sensors in his cowl setting off a silent alarm, he might have missed it. Instead, he lifted his hand just as Jason’s eyelids opened just a little.

“Bruce...”

Suddenly, it was as if his hand had reached right into a fire and Bruce withdrew it in an instant. He had been through this often enough. Two seconds from now, Jason would be wide awake and then there would be hell to pay. Jason did not need a fight. Bruce did not want one. And a fight was exactly where this was going to head unless he came up with exactly the right thing to say to Jason, possibly even if he did. Despite the stab of regret and guilt that pierced through his heart at the thought, Ghost got up quickly and escaped through the fire escape.

The storm was still going strong and Bruce cursed under his breath as he resumed his perch on the other side of the street. There was too much snow for him to see into Jason’s apartment. He switched back to cowl vision and watched silently as Jason sat up in his bed, clearly confused and slightly alarmed, judging from his heart rate. He was checking his surroundings, eyeing the shadows of the apartment when a sudden stab of pain in his shoulder sent him back down into the sheets. With a deep breath, Jason rolled over and buried his face in the pillow once more. Bruce sighed.

It was not an ideal outcome, not by a long shot, but Jason was safe. Safe and alive and – in an hour or two, once the heaters had been running for a while – he would also be warm again. For now, that would have to be enough.

It really did make him feel like they were back to day one.


End file.
